Get data out of Google with Takeout

Google announces new service that extracts your data from its products

Shares

The Data Liberation Front: here to liberate your data

An engineering team within Google calling itself "The Data Liberation Front" has unveiled Google Takeout, a service that enables you to download a convenient archive of your Google data. It will grab your Picasa Web Albums, data from Buzz, your profile and contacts so that you can back it up, or even leave Google, if that's what you want.

Over on the The Data Liberation Front homepage, you can click individual products such as Blogger or Google Docs to discover how to get your data out of those services. But it's not just about getting data out: you might have liberated your data from another service, and want to get it into a Google product. There's information on the easiest way to do that as well.

Making it easier for customers to leave its services is an unusual move, but Google says it's because "if it's easier for you to leave, we have to work that much harder to make sure that you don't want to".